In Enemy Hands

"Very well," he said to Fraiser at last. "I assume Citizen Captain Hewitt already has that information?" Fraiser nodded, and Tourville shrugged. "In that case, inform Citizen Committeewoman Ransom her message has been received."

No one on Flag Bridge missed the fact that he hadn't told Fraiser to acknowledge Ransom's message, thus confirming her orders would actually be obeyed. Nor did any of them, including Honeker, fail to grasp that by Navy standards, a simple, curt notice of receipt was, in fact, a none-too-veiled insult to the message's originator. It was possible Ransom might not realize that, but, frankly, Tourville no longer really cared what Cordelia Ransom did or did not realize.

Count Tilly's vector diverged gradually from Tepes', and Tourville watched the small, bright dot of Cerberus-B-3 grow slowly on the main view screen.

Horace Harkness twitched as the chrono under his pillow beeped. He'd taken it off his wrist and shoved it under the pillow to keep its sound from waking anyone else, and he swallowed a silent curse as it beeped again. He hadn't been to sleep all night, though no one would have thought it to look at him, or he hoped they wouldn't have, anyway, and he'd set the alarm as the only way he could think of to keep himself from checking the time at compulsive five-minute intervals. He'd been confident the pillow would swallow its sound completely, yet now that the thing had gone off, its muted voice seemed to echo in the darkened compartment like thunder.

But that was all in his mind, he told himself firmly, not that his pulse rate seemed impressed by his firmness. It was only because the beep told him it was time to put his plans into operation. Well, that and the fact that he realized just what a piss-poor chance he had of actually carrying all this off. Unfortunately, they were the only plans he'd been able to come up with, which didn't offer him a lot of options.

The chrono beeped yet again, and his hand darted under the pillow to silence it. Then he drew a deep breath, licked his lips, and sat up in his bunk. He swung his legs over the side and stood very slowly, bare feet silent on the decksole. Heinrich Johnson's deep, slow breathing and Hugh Candleman’s nasal snores didn't even falter, and his jaw clenched. This was the part he'd hated most when he pla

His left hand snapped out, grasping Johnson’s chin and yanking it upward, pushing the back of the StateSec man's head harder into his pillow and arching his neck. The corporal's eyes opened, unfocused and confused, but he hadn't even realized he was awake, much less what was happening, when Harkness' right hand came down like an axe. Johnson started to suck in air, but any shout he might have given died in an agonized wheeze as his larynx shattered. He thrashed and jerked, hands pawing at his throat while he fought for breath that wouldn't come, but Harkness had already turned away. Heinrich Johnson was already a dead man; he simply hadn't realized it yet, and Harkness still had Candleman to worry about.

The second StateSec guard made a snorting sound and stirred sleepily. For all their violence, Johnson’s death throes weren't very loud, and Candleman never had a chance to realize what the harsh, choking sounds which had penetrated his sleep might portend. He was still moving muzzily towards the boundary of wakefulness when two callused hands locked on his head and twisted explosively. For just an instant, the sickening crunch of vertebrae seemed to completely bury the sounds of Johnson’s fading, desperate efforts to breathe, and then those sounds, too, died, and Horace Harkness stood back in the darkness, closed his eyes, and shuddered with sick loathing.

It wasn't the first time he'd killed, but it was the first time he'd killed someone he actually knew or done it with his bare hands rather than missiles or an energy mount, and it was different this way. He felt unclean, for neither Johnson nor Candleman had even guessed what was coming. But that had been the point. He couldn't have allowed them to guess, and so he'd had to become their partner, their good friend and buddy the venal ex-Manty, so that he could murder them in their sleep.

His fists clenched at his sides, and he stood motionless but for the tiny shudders he couldn't quite still. But then his nostrils flared, and he opened his eyes once more. He'd already been through this when he pla

Both of them were locked, but Horace Harkness had opened quite a few locks which had belonged to someone else over the course of a checkered career, and he had the advantage of having watched their owners open these dozens of times. He input the combinations quickly, and his mouth twitched in a hungry smile as the lockers' internal lights gleamed on his dead watchdogs' weapons.

He strapped Johnson’s gun belt around his own waist before he drew and checked the pulser. Magazine and capacitor both showed full, and he went quickly through the belt pouches to confirm the presence of extra magazines and power packs. Then he shoved one of the corporal's uniform tunics and a pair of trousers into a laundry bag and turned to Candleman's locker. He made the same check on the private's side arm and hung the second gun belt diagonally from right shoulder to left hip like a bandoleer, then closed the lockers, scooped up the minicomp he'd used to rig the game software, and plugged it into the access slot on the compartment bulkhead.

He used Johnson’s password to log on. Had computers cared about such things, Tepes' computer might have been amazed by the quantum leap in the programming skills of Citizen Corporal Heinrich Johnson, SN SS-1002-56722-0531-HV. But computers didn't care, and Harkness flipped quickly through the pathways he'd established while Johnson and Candleman assumed he was simply rigging the outcomes of games for them.

He hadn't dared make any major changes on the main system lest one of the officers or NCOs who were computer literate stumble across his work, but that hadn't prevented him from making all those changes well in advance on the minicomp. Of course, seeing to it his little packages were activated at the proper time and in the proper order was going to be a bit of a problem, but he hoped he'd taken that sufficiently into account. And there was one bit of programming he had been forced to change ahead of time. Now he checked it and grunted in satisfaction; it had activated eighteen minutes and twenty-one seconds earlier, exactly as instructed, and he gri

As far as anyone else aboard PNS Tepes was concerned, nothing at all happened, but Harkness and his minicomp knew better. Throughout the battlecruiser’s electronic guts, half a dozen programs changed abruptly, overwritten by the versions of themselves which Harkness had downloaded to his minicomp and altered, in most cases subtly; in others not so subtly, days or even weeks before.